In Our Time - Deism

Episode Date: October 8, 2020

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the idea that God created the universe and then left it for humans to understand by reason not revelation. Edward Herbert, 1583-1648 (pictured above) held that there were five religious truths: belief in a Supreme Being, the need to worship him, the pursuit of a virtuous life as the best form of worship, repentance, and reward or punishment after death. Others developed these ideas in different ways, yet their opponents in England's established Church collected them under the label of Deists, called Herbert the Father of Deism and attacked them as a movement, and Deist books were burned. Over time, reason and revelation found a new balance in the Church in England, while Voltaire and Thomas Paine explored the ideas further, leading to their re-emergence in the French and American Revolutions.With Richard Serjeantson Fellow and Lecturer in History at Trinity College, CambridgeKatie East Lecturer in History at Newcastle UniversityAnd Thomas Ahnert Professor of Intellectual History at the University of EdinburghProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programmes. Hello, in 17th century England, the public hangman would burn band books. He could warm his hands on anything published by deists. There were free thinkers who argued that God began the universe and then stood back,

and people could only understand God by reason and not by revelation. It was part of an enormous wrench away from the church. Deists were attacked by clerics who dealt in revelation and by philosophers who thought that reason had its limits, but their ideas were influential as the church began to lose importance in the state during the Enlightenment. With me, from their homes, to discuss Deism R. Katie East, a lecturer in history at Newcastle University,

Thomas Arnett, Professor of Intellectual History at the University of Edinburgh, and Richard Sargerson, fellow and lecturer in history at Trinity College, Cambridge. Richard Sargerton, since the Reformation, how free were people to think of a religion that was different from an established church? Well, they were free to think of a different religion, to a very limited extent, but they certainly weren't free to publicise ideas about a different religion. And a fundamental feature of deism is that its writings are produced sideways, we might say. Irony, even sarcasm is a way in which religious ideas that are unwelcome to authorities are produced.

How risky was this clampdown that stick to England? As you say, England, which is in many ways the crucible of deism, which becomes a wider movement in the later 17th and 18th centuries. in England, I suppose the crucial point to bear in mind is that following the Reformation, religion within England is highly contested. The Church of England doesn't have a fixed identity. At certain points in the mid-17th century, the Church of England is abolished in the Civil War, that's to say. Bishops are abolished. The king, by the time we get to the late 17th century, is himself a Catholic. That's to say, James II.

Everybody agrees that they are a Christian. There emerges slowly and with difficulty people who are mostly called by their enemies, deists, but occasionally own up to the name themselves, who might challenge some fundamental principles of the Christianity that the warring factions of Christian confessions had nonetheless contrived to agree on up to that point. When we're talking about Christianity then, Richard, we're talking about something that's not only religious, but it's political, it's social, it's dominating in so many different ways.

That's right. That's very important. Christianity is a religion that has profound political consequences and also social consequences. Politics is bound up with the state. The state requires that subscriptions be made to certain Christian doctrines. Subscription to the 39 articles, of course, is the most prominent of those in the English context. But there's also a very, very powerful sense. This is crucial for understanding. Deism, the very powerful sense that Christianity is socially necessary for the well-being of society and that if Christianity is challenged, then not only the politics but also the social fabric might collapse. And the challenge to those kind of views that Deism offers is one reason why it's such a striking and difficult phenomenon. Thank you. Katie East, one man, Lord Herbert

of Cherbury was to be called the father of deism. How did he get that title? He was living really towards the end of the 16th century in the first half of the 17th century. And he worked particularly as a diplomat, as well as a philosopher. And in 1619, he travelled over to France to act as ambassador for England there. And while there, he engaged in his philosophical work, primarily epistemology. And he published in 1624 in France a work called De Veritarte on

truth. And in that, he put forward an epistemology which advocated the use of what he called right reason over and above authorities. That was how you could identify what is true, look to reason. The natural human ability to evaluate truth instead of it's been this way for centuries, it says so in the Bible, it says so in Aristotle, looking to those kinds of authorities to find the answers to things and instead using your own innate reason. Is that the basis of his continuing contribution to this? He then has to extrapolate on what that means really in a practical sense,

that dependence on reason. And one of the key elements he identifies is something he calls common notions, which he says are these sort of universal ideas that are implanted by God in every person. So every person recognizes them to be true. And where that sort of begins to interconnect with the deism and religious question is that he applies that idea of common notions to religion.

And he develops these five common notions that he says, unify all religious beliefs. All religions have these five common notions. All beliefs are tied up by this. So those five common notions are firstly that God exists. secondly that God ought to be worshipped. Thirdly, the virtue must be a chief part of that worship. Fourthly, that you must repent of all wickedness.

And finally, that you will face reward or punishment, depending on your daily life, in the afterlife. And he said that any revelation that went against those could not be truly divine. So that's really why he's identified as the father of deism, is because he set out these criteria by which to determine whether revelation is true or not, implying that some revelation is not true. And as indicated by your original question about him being the father of deism,

it was enough to bracket him together with those much more radical thinkers who came later. Thank you very much. Thomas Arnott, would you describe this as a movement? The main sort of deistic writers of the late 17th, and say roughly the first third of the 18th century. I mean, their careers and their lives overlap. They don't really represent a fully worked out sort of monolithic, intellectual system, but certain ideas, they share certain ideas,

and above all, they have certain shared aims. They are all critical of established religion, especially established religion as it exists in England. And does that affect standing in? society. Are there books burnt, for instance? Yes, the books are burned, for example, one of the deists, Anthony Collins, has his work is burned. What these authors argue is that religion, religious belief, has become corrupt. And it has become corrupt, so not by accident, but by design, because what they say is that priests have distorted an original simple faith,

in such a way, they've turned it into superstition in such a way that it allows them to exercise power over the laity. So what, although there's some sort of differences of opinion or differences of emphasis at least between these various theorists, this sort of religious critique of the power of the clergy goes hand in hand with, also with a particular political agenda, because to them this kind of priestly deceit or priestcraft, as they call it, goes hand in hand with political tyranny. This would cause an upheaval there. Do you have any comment on that, Richard or Katie? To pick up on something that Katie said,

I completely agree with her interpretation of Herbert of Charbury, who's the brother, by the way of George Herbert, the Anglican poet, and as she says, is certainly a man of religion, though not necessarily of Christianity. In his case, it's very much, I think, that as he became older, he became bolder, and it was with his later books in particular, including his de religione gentilium on the religion of the pagans, that he really began, I think, to expose his profound doubts about certain aspects of Christian doctrine,

above all original sin, but also the divinity of Christ. And then stories began to circulate about his death after that had happened when Archbishop Ashaer of Armagh refused him the sacrament on his deathbed. That raises a further important point about deism, which Thomas has hinted at, which is its relationship between moral life and religious belief. One of the things that the enemies of deists are very keen to stress is that deists must be wicked and subversive, and of course that they'll come to a bad end after their own deaths. And so there's a great deal of interest in how such people die, because if you can die with a clear conscience rather than racked by the infidelity of your beliefs, then that becomes a kind of touchstone for how virtuous, how far you can live your virtue, so to speak, and live your commitment to virtue.

That later work published posthumously, it's a work in which he looks to the ancient religions to the Greeks and the Romans. and says, look, they adhere to those principles, those common notions that I identified prior to the established Christian church. And what he in particular does is looks to prominent ancient figures. Cicero is the main one who jumps to mind and says, look, this was a virtuous man. You know, no one can deny his virtue in spite of existing sort of without revelation. So clearly there was already anticipating

that criticism about virtue that Richard was talking about there. Can I come back to you for a moment, Richard? Where did Jesus figure in this argument? These potentially slightly dry debates about Christology, that's to say the doctrine of Jesus Christ's role in theology, are actually fundamental to understanding why deism was regarded as being so potentially dangerous. in several ways. Jesus Christ in Christian theology is held to be one of the persons of the Trinity.

The Trinity is a mystery, technically speaking, because it is three persons in one. And there is a great deal of skepticism growing about the doctrine of the Trinity in later 17th century Europe, and the dais are very much riding on that wave. And so if you have doubts about the divinity of Jesus Christ, Christ, as the deists, I think we can say universally do, then you are effectively saying that he was not God. That has important implications because in Christianity Christ is the mediator between God and man and therefore from an Orthodox Christian point of view, if you don't believe in Christ, you can't be saved. But a further way in which Christ is important, of course, is that he

apparently performed miracles to confirm his divinity. And therefore that's why the deist critique of Miracles is so important, because if you can in some way persuade your readers that Christ did not, in fact, perform miracles, that's a further way in which you're undermining his claim to be divine. Now, all these theological doctrines have very practical social and political consequences, because if you undermine the New Testament story and the divinity of Christ that that tells, of course, it's a bit of a scandal in Christian theology that's no clear outlining of the doctrine of the Trinity in the Bible, and that's something that enemies of Trinitarianism are very keen to stress, and which is a bit of embarrassment, as I say, to those who want to defend it.

But if you undermine Jesus Christ in all these ways, then you're also undermining the idea that the structures of Christian religion have some kind of divine sanction. And this is really important if you think, as Orthodox Anglican belief holds in this period, well, actually it's much debated, but there's a sort of right-wing wing of the Church of England, so to speak, which would want to stress that bishops hold their office by divine right. And that divine right is ultimately a right that goes back to the divinity of Jesus Christ.

So if you undermine the divinity of Jesus Christ by a long chain of implication, one of the things you're doing is undermining the status of bishops within church and state. Thank you very much for that. Thomas. I would like to try to get it over to the listeners, how vivid and important and fierce this conflict was. This was the meat and drink of intellectual society and of conflict in that society. Yes, the idea that reasons somehow,

reason and experience somehow are sufficient to provide people with all the religious beliefs they need, they might need, is viewed as an extraordinary dangerous by many. So one of the early sort of critics of deists in the early 18th century, called Samuel Clark, who is an Anglican clergyman, who's himself not really entirely orthodox, what he really tries to do is to sort of present deism, which at that time is quite a protein

phenomenon, it's not always easy to pin it down, but what he tries to do is to try to present deism as a particular type of religious error. And what he says is that if you really, like the deists, you assume that reason and experience are all you need, in religious matters, then you will not only actually end up with a set of religious beliefs which is simply insufficient for obtaining salvation, which after all is still the paramount aim in the 18th century. This is a serious concern. It may seem very alien to us, but this matters. You will not only end up with beliefs that are insufficient to achieve that goal, but you will also, in many cases, end up with beliefs that are completely incompatible,

with it. So in one of his sermons, for example, he starts with what he considers to be the worst type of dais, and that is someone who does believe in a god of some sort, but does not believe that this God governs the world with, by providence. So God basically creates the world, steps back and has no further interest in it. Then there's a slightly less bad type of daisst who believes that God created the world. And still sort of influences its functioning, but is not really bothered about moral, good and evil in that world. It's simply, you know, the world sort of unfurled events in the world, unfurled according to certain laws, but it doesn't really matter where these moral

distinctions don't really matter. Then there are deists who believe, according to Clark, who believe that God does make sort of moral distinctions, but does not offer rewards and punishments for them in the afterlife. And that, of course, is considered a crucial foundation of public morality at the time because it's just a matter of experience that not all good deeds are rewarded in this life, not all bad deeds are punished in this life. So it's widely assumed that if you really want to provide people with a proper incentive to act morally in this life, then you have to hold out the prospect of an afterlife in which rewards and punishments will be needed out. And then finally, there are deists who believe in divine providence,

even the immortality of the soul. But Clark says there can't be very many of them because if you've reached that stage of deism, then you will automatically accept Christianity. But the point is that there are very real fears that if you go down a deist route, if you start relying on reason and experience only, then you will end up with conclusions which are not only directly contrary to Christianity, but subversive of public morality, public order. Katie East, can I bring in another advocate of at this stage, a man called John Tolland. Could you tell us a bit about him and why he's important? Oh, I'd love to. He's important because he is an extremely skilled controversialist, and his

particular skill is turning the weapons of his opponents against them. There's a wonderful quote from Paul Hazard in 1935. He says that Tolland loved having brickbats thrown at him because they made a clatter as they fell to the ground. I'm paraphrasing. But to get that sense that he just loved provoking people. But he in 16, well, somewhere between December 1695 and June 1696, published a work which is broadly identified as the starting point of the real height of deist controversies, which was Christianity not mysterious, initially published anonymously and then sort of retrospectively

claimed with pride after it provoked such an uproar in which, as the title indicates, he denied mysteries and said all religious truth should be accessible through human reason, any rejection of miracles, a call for evidence of those supernatural elements of religion. So all those elements of deism that Thomas identified. And this provoked a huge reaction. And I think it ties in a bit to what you were saying before about. how to get a sense of how controversial this debate was, because here was the pamphlet published in 1696

and the sheer weight of responses, so further pamphlets of longer texts, of sermons like those of Samuel Clark that Thomas identified, which would not just be delivered at the pulpit, but then written out and printed and circulated as well. So the huge controversy and the fact that the English Parliament took it upon themselves to act against this work, which was then burned by the common hangman this time in Ireland, it provoked this huge controversy and indicated the kind of threat that a deistic type writer could pose to the established church purely through the kind of attention

they could receive as much as anything. Thank you. Can I ask you, Richard, when people think of the Enlightenment now, very simplistically, they think of Newton, signs, the development of theories which explain the world outside the Old and New Testament. Was there a relationship between deism and the advance of scientific reason that gave deism an extra cylinder? There is a relationship, but I'm afraid, a complex one, or possibly even just a two-sided one. One might want to argue that certain, as it were, elements in deism are given extra force by developments in natural philosophy or physics in the late 17th and 18th centuries.

For instance, there are various ways in which the mathematical, mechanical vision of the universe that's emerging after Galileo and in the hands of Newton in England. Newton, by the way, is also not a Trinitarian. Not sure it's helpful to call him a dais, but he certainly doesn't believe in the Trinity. And there are followers of Newton who are a bit more explicit. I'm thinking here of William Whiston, who do incline to... as it were, use scientific conclusions of the day to arrive at religious answers or deistic answers rather than Christian answers. But I would want to stress on the other side that there's a

massive effort made in the later 17th and 18th centuries by Orthodox Christians to co-opt the scientific developments of the period for Christian apologetic. And although it's quite hard to use Newtonian physics and Galilean astronomy to actually prove, the divinity of Jesus Christ, people are very willing to use those kind of ideas to prove, as it were, fundamental or basic tenets of Christianity. And so I don't think there's an inherent connection myself, although these are debated matters, between scientific developments across this important and powerful period and deism. Can I bring in you here, Thomas? I mean, Samuel Clark, who is a critic of deism, he's also at the same time a defender

of Newtonianism. I mean, in the famous correspondence with Gottweed, Willem Leibniz, in Germany, it is Clark who takes up the defense of Newtonians. So as Richard has said, there's no straightforward relationship between the so-called new science, the experimental method of the late 17th century, and deism, although it can sometimes provide the tools that deists are looking for. I mean, Toland, at one point, he uses natural scientific or, as they would call it, natural philosophical argument, as part of its broader deistic worldview. So it is possible to co-opt it. It is possible for deists to co-opt it,

but it's not a straightforward relationship. It can be used, these scientific tools can be used for different purposes. There's no intellectual inevitability about it. What do you think at this stage, these ideas, these deistic ideas, how much of an impact are they making on what we, let's call it, a more general public. We know they were talked about in intellectual circles, and again, that's a very, very simple.

But how far did they go across class, across education, across the country? Importantly, I think many of these deistic writers are actually connected to political debates of the day and rather directly. I mean, Toland at one point is sent on a diplomatic mission to Hanover. Later on, he travels to.

to Berlin, where he meets the Queen of Prussia, Sophia Shalot. So these are not necessarily people who are completely on the margins of public life. Can I bring Katie in on this? And Katie, can you tell us what was happening in this country? And how much they were stirring in public debate outside a group of people, which don't seem to have the centre that we would like them to have the days. Outside that group, was this biting into the way people, We're talking to each other, the arguments that were going on that were important.

It has to be in that sort of elite to an extent for pure literacy and leisure time reasons. But I think it's really important to recognise the shift in print culture that was happening in this period. In 1695, the licensing act had lapsed. So that meant there was just much more freedom of publication, much less censorship. the cost of print was much lower, so these very cheap, small pamphlets could be produced very quickly. Thousands of copies would be sold of some of these pamphlets, and of course the responses they provoked could go up into the hundreds.

Another interesting arena in which these ideas were discussed were coffee houses, which became this increasingly important site of intellectual culture, intellectual collaboration, particularly in the early 18th century because for sort of the cost of a cup of coffee you could go in and there would be the latest journals, sermons, pamphlets and so on there to be read and discussed. And there was one in particular,

the Grecian coffee house that was famed for being a hub of activity for those men who we would now identify as deists or free thinkers. So lots of different ways in which it permeated, certainly the broader intellectual culture. Richard, did any group of people feel particularly outside the general church institutional establishment? Who felt particularly threatened by the deists, by their ideas? Picking up on what Katie's been saying,

one of the key things to suggest about the earlier period in deism is it's very much men who see themselves as members of the laity and who are exploring their religion for themselves without necessarily the intermediation of a priest. And so they often publish books called things like or write treatises called the religion of a layman. And so this in turn means that the priests who they are, as it were, willfully ignoring, feel threatened.

We've been talking a lot about the Church of England across the later 17th and 18th centuries. We might also mention, though, that Presbyterians are often particularly challenged by deism. And some of the writings that are, some of the most prominent writings against deists appear from Edinburgh, appear from Belfast, and appear from the northeastern seaboard of America,

from Presbyterian writers. Why do they feel particularly challenged? Sorry to interrupt you, but why do they feel particular challenged? And the reason for that is that Presbyterianism is a religion which intensely values the role of the pastor and also of the elders in a Christian community. And it's a very communal religion, but it's also a religion that insists upon the importance of authoritative figures serving in a disciplinary and in a pedagogic fashion.

And the Presbyterians therefore clearly regarded. deism as especially challenging to those honourable principles of their religion. Just to sum up the English experience before we move on, Katie. Was there any sense at any time that deism came to come in from the fringe and occupy the centre of the argument about religion? Yes, I think so, because I think it's not just that deism came into the mainstream, as much as the fringes of orthodoxy merged with. with what we might call deistic arguments.

So actually what Thomas is saying about science is quite indicates this, that it's so close that that use of Newtonian science between the orthodox and the heterodox that they permeate at the edges there. So I think what we see as much as anything is the church, or at least parts of it, those more open to new ideas,

assimilating and adapting to different political and scientific developments that were occurring more broadly in the country, recognising the need to integrate and work with things like Newtonian science and the increasing understanding of the universe, and consequently building up something they could identify as a rational Christianity, which sort of brings us back to that notion of the problems with daisistic reason as a kind of elevation, of reason there as faultless and Christianity was able to say, well, we, we accept reason, but within limits and that it needs that additional guidance from God sometimes. So I think it's sort of, that's part of what went wrong for deism in a way, is that a lot of its stronger arguments just got subsumed into the fringes of Christianity.

I wonder whether what Richard and Katie think about the idea that there is actually a shift in the nature of the sort of targets of daisom in the sort of 1730, 1740s. Richard? I think that happens, though I also think that certain traditions of polemic against them are consolidated. If we think of, for instance, the Presbyterian John Leland's very influential, as it were, history of deistic writers that comes out in the 1750s, that in a way is picking up and consolidating a story that's, that's been put together since the beginning of the 18th century.

I suppose I wanted, if I may, I would make a slightly different point to again picking up or developing my thoughts about the importance of raillery and of irony in deistic writing. One of the things that happens is that the Earl of Shaftsbury, an important early 18th century moral philosopher, with slightly ambiguous relationships for deism, He's sometimes co-opted for it and sometimes not. He makes the rather mischievous argument that if you can make fun of something,

then that's an argument against its veracity. And of course, this is very damaging when these deists have been doing little but that for the previous generation. The intellectual argument, I think, is lost to a great extent. And one of the signifiers of that, in an odd way, is John Layland. in 1754, he publishes a view on the principal daisical writers in which one of the main attacks he makes is that there is no unified, agreed ideology of daism, which is a really unfair argument to make because, as we've pointed out, there's no group identifying as deists. Yeah, it's one that sticks. You know, they're set up against the Anglican church with all of its resources, intellectual and financial.

and with a very unified, well, a fairly unified sense of self, whereas the deists, as Leilin points out, did not have that. And so could not confront that. Thank you very much. Thomas, Thomas Arnaz, can we go to France now and bring in Voltaire? And France is regarded as a place, well, until the revolution, when they abolished religion, we had the cult of the supreme being. But can you tell us what line they were taking, particularly Voltaire, say?

Well, Voltaire, I mean, Voltaire, of course, he spends time several years in England in the late 1720s at a time when these deists like Collins like Tyndall are around. I mean, Tyndall publishes his big Christianity as old as creation early in 1730. But you would have thought that Voltaire would pick up on these deist controversies while he is in England. I mean, in the letters concerning the English nation, which it publishes in 1733, he doesn't really comment on the deist controversies. But Volta does seem to pick up on the writings by the English deists later, and they do become important, especially from the 1760s. What we have in France, most dramatically, in the French Revolution, is the abolition of Christianity. and the into the revolution

and the cult of the supreme being. Do you think the deism had any effect on that happening? Well, I think that the cult of the supreme being is an attempt by Oropshire at the time to institute a kind of civil religion, a public religion, which is, again, you know, considered necessary for the sake of public morality.

It's a response to reaction to the more radical or extreme forms of irreligion within the French Revolution. Of course, I mean, the Catholic Church has been what was under attack from the beginning of the revolution and the civil constitution of the clergy. The French Catholic clergy are turned into effect into state officials. Many Catholic clergymen refused to swear the required oath to the constitution and become involved in sort of counter-revolutionary movements, which increases the suspicion towards Catholicism, the Catholic Church. And so from this develops a de-Christianizing movement, which in some cases turns into outright irreligion. And Robsby, as a sort of cult of the supreme being, I think, is an attempt

to rein in some of these more extreme manifestations of irreligion. And it's certainly what the cult of the supreme being looks very much. much like a kind of deistic, minimal religion. Yes, and the... Justified also, especially in terms of its effects or its necessity for maintaining public morality. And the argument about Reza was taken up most passionately by Thomas Payne.

And very effectively, in America, what do you have to say about that, Richard Saunderson, and the effect it had that? Well, in fact, there's a direct French. connection because Payne's notoriously daistic book, The Age of Reason, being an investigation of true and fabulous theology, is written while Payne, I think, is imprisoned in Paris in 1793. It's published first in Paris in 74, but it's also published to great disgust in London at the same time and to great acclaim and a wide readership in America.

And so Payne is a figure who brings together lots of strands of the deistic tradition. He's originally of a Quaker background, but he's born in Thetford, but he's as much French and American as he is English by the end of his life. And he, of course, knows personally and discusses religious ideas with people like Thomas Jefferson, both before and after the American Revolution. So if Payne is the most famous American deist, Jefferson too is someone for whom deism has often thought to be important, though Jefferson's a bit circumspect about actually calling himself for deist. Another well-known American of this period, of course, is Benjamin Franklin, who in his autobiography explicitly says that after reading books,

against daism, he soon became himself a thorough daist. And this is very much a kind of dramatization of a process that both the orthodox and the unorthodox are keen to emphasize that these arguments often cut both ways and that what is intended to persuade can sometimes, as it were, deconvert. So daism is significant in colonial America as it is in Enlightenment, And this emerges in various ways, of course, because whereas in England you can't hope to become a member of parliament. You can't hope to go to the universities. I don't think you can join the army unless you are willing to subscribe to the principles of the Church of England in its 39 articles. So daists like nonconformists are excluded from all these institutions.

and this is one explanation for why the founders of the American Republic are so keen to play down the role of religious tests in their new polity. We're coming to the end now. Katie, can you briefly tell us what, if any, were there any major changes as a result of deism or any changes you can point out to us? Well, I think in addition to what I mentioned, before about it sort of permeating into established Christianity. It's very much identified as part of the Enlightenment process in terms of the impact it had. And I think that's indicated by what Thomas and Richard have been saying about France and about America.

And it has a real impact more broadly. How we interpret Daism is very much connected to how we interpret the Enlightenment as a phenomenon. Is it, you know, was Daism the sort of radicalism? radical outsiders trying to challenge everything, or were they more reform-minded Christian sympathizers and how we perceive that really has an impact on how we perceive the Enlightenment as a whole, because ultimately these writers, these thinkers,

were quite central to the Enlightenment process in terms of directing the discussion that was taking place. Just another thing I find interesting about Daism and its potential impact is something you mentioned in the introduction, and we haven't touched on that much, which is that it's not something that people identify as. It's used primarily as a term to attack and discredit. It's a polemical term.

And I think it's really interesting, the example that's set through these debates about how you can use a single term, an epithet like that, to try and discredit your opponent and completely delegitimize their point of view, a tactic we see today quite often. But it's a really interesting rhetorical legacy from the deism controversy.

Thank you. Briefly, Thomas, and then Richard, finally. Thomas. Well, I think deism, it's can't sort of occupy a very sort of prominent place in a more sort of general account of intellectual change, even sort of secularisation in the 18th century.

Because deism, I mean, it's very often sort of seen as the typical expression or the typical form that religion takes in the Enlightenment, if you take, enlightenment's thought to be the age of reason, and deism looks very much like it's sort of an attempt to apply Enlightenment principles to religion. And as Katie has said, I mean, very often these deistic arguments, they seem to become more mainstream, more accepted, and so that actually deism can look very much like an enlightened attempt to sort of update Christianity for a different age. It can look like an attempt to place what are in effect traditional Christian beliefs in providence, immortality, the existence of an

afterlife with rewards and punishments. It can look like an attempt to place these kinds of conventional truth on new and more robust intellectual foundations. And it can look like a sort of halfway station between an older, more scripturally based idea of religion and a more recent, more modern secular worldview. So I think that is, it has come to occupy that kind of place in many accounts, in general accounts of intellectual change in Europe in the, in the the 18th century. And finally, Richard. Well, I would just supplement what Katie and Thomas have said by saying that the implication of what they've been saying is that is helpful insofar as it helps us to see that deism is not the same as atheism. Deists stress continue to stress the

role of providence. They stress that there is a God, even if there is just one and that he is not three in person. They stress, the importance of reward and punishment after death. Atheism, as it emerges, partly in parallel and partly slightly later than deism, doesn't think that all these claims are necessary to make. And so one of the things that happens to deism is that it is in some sense supplanted by those who want to go further and who want to make a case in certain different ways for atheism. And in a sense, although there are still deists now, they're very much a minority compared to people who've thought seriously about the ways in which they are atheists rather than, as deists are sometimes called theists.

That's to say, they are still believers in something. Well, thank you all very much. Thank you, Katie East, Thomas Arnett and Richard Sargentson. Next week, the founder of computer science, Alan Turing. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. One point I'd quite like to make is, towards the end of the discussion I said that deism can look like, it's sometimes considered this, it's almost considered synonymous with Enlightenment religion.

But I think one of the points to make is that religion in the Enlightenment, even religion is that that's characteristic of Enlightenment thought and culture, is more diverse than that. There are actually many other forms of religious belief, which are just as typical of the Enlightenment as deism is, but which are quite different from it. So I think the kind of narrative that deism is often placed into is perhaps a little too neat sometimes, that there's actually a slightly messier picture that emerges.

There's more sort of variety of religious belief. I mean, if you take, for example, some of the figures in the Scottish Enlightenment, historians like William Robertson, they are clearly figures of the Enlightenment. At the same time, they're actually quite skeptical about the usefulness of reason in religious argument. They do not believe that you can derive a comprehensive set of religious beliefs from reason and experience alone. Richard, do you have anything to add to that? Well, one of the things we didn't say very much about, but I hinted out at the very beginning,

is the importance of irony, sarcasm, humour, wit to deist writers. Obviously, they don't have a monopoly on those things, but their enemies often comment on how much raillery there is in their writings. And I think this is an important thing to bear in mind because, of course, humor is one way in which you can be subversive. you can as it were stay ostensibly within the bounds of orthodoxy, and yet by your ironies and your wit, you can also very clearly undermine pieties and orthodoxies. And that's an important element in deist writing. If I may, though, there's a further thing I'd like to ask Katie. I suspect she may have slightly different ideas than Thomas and myself about the role of natural science and daism, and I'd love to hear them if she does. Oh, not a different view. I wanted to sort of build on it by saying about how Toland used science and then Thomas sort of answered that as well, but just that it spoke to what I was saying about Toland using the weapons of his enemies against them. One thing he loved to do was take Newtonian science, particularly notions of matter and motion and speak in that language and sort of refer to Newton and his ideas and align himself with that. so that he could then turn it around. And in his letters to Serena in 1704 sort of said, well, yes, matter. But it's self-moving.

You know, you don't need that external force, which is very much part of obviously Newton's version. But it's that manipulating of other people's dialogues and ideas that was interesting. I wonder whether one thing I'm wondering about is whether the something about what happens to deism after the 1730s and how the, to what extent, the nature and the aims of deism change after the sort of 1730s and 40s, because it seems to me that before then, until about the 1730s, it is very much an attack on the structures within the Anglican church, the use of superstition to exercise power over the laity. Whereas what strikes me about, say, the 1740s, 1750s is that, As you and also Richard pointed out, I mean, many of the critics of deism are Presbyterians.

Presbyterians begin to be worried about deism in a sense, the way that I think it seems to become much more a debate about the authority of Revelation versus the authority of reason, whereas up until about 1730, it seems to a greater extent a polemical attack, I mean, which is, of course, justified in terms of general intellectual principles and ideas. Even though Leyland's text actually has a lot to do with the historiographical legacy of deism, it also, I think, indicates one of the major flaws for the deists in terms of creating a cogent legacy and maintaining a position. And the other point I was just going to raise in terms of their decline in that period, I think it has a lot to do with the political context.

the High Church and the threat from the High Church is such a galvanising factor both for the actions of those deistic writers in terms of why they write so virulently, but also the term deism being used as a way of riling up fear and hostility against these writers by the High Church, feeding into the whole the church-endanger narrative

that they've constructed. So as that shifts and that balance of power within the church shifts, deism has less relevance, I think. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Have you ever wondered what teachers talk about when no one else is listening? Well, you're about to find out. I'm Maureen Bake and my brand new podcast, The Secret Life of Teachers, goes behind the headlines to see what's really going on as teachers go back to school after the lockdown. I was a teacher for almost a decade, but I never witnessed a time like this. So I've created my own virtual secret staff room,

where each week some teacher friends and I will discuss everything from remote learning and mental health to offset inspections and teachers behaving badly. If you'd also like to overhear their uncensored staffroom confessions, then subscribe to my podcast, The Secret Life of Teachers on BBC Sounds.